"Just stop oil"

[Angilion]

I agree, charging say 0-80% needs to be down to <5mins as, for me at least, this is the biggest EV issue irrespective of "range anxiety".

I mean ICE has "range anxiety" too but as it's <5mins to fill up and crack on again we've become accustomed to that delay, so until EV charging matches (or gets as close to) ICE cars filling up then the days of 15-45mins spent charging with our rapidly increasing number of EV's vs the current limited number of serviceable chargers just isn't going to work.

Personally I can't wait to be in the position to buy an EV (house with a garage/drive which I can charge, lower cost etc) as I've enjoyed the few drives I've had in one.

There's a potentially possibly viable new battery technology that might perhaps maybe solve that problem in the not vastly distant future. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly.

Yeah, I know. It's the bazillionth such claim in the last 15 years. But there is a huge difference in this case - batteries using the new battery tech are actually being made and have been sent to potential major customers for evaluation. Actual batteries, produced in an actual production facility and expected to work in real world use. Not lab-only prototypes. Only button batteries at the moment, but it's something. Energy density is lower than Li-ion, but the charging rate is vastly higher and the lower energy density is partially offset by not needing cooling (so more cells can be packaged into the same amount of space). Charging is as much as 70 times as fast. EV scale use isn't really on the horizon yet, though. It doesn't currently look possible to be supplying that much electricity at that rate. Theoretically you could pour it in at a rate of hundreds of KW and charge the batteries for an EV in a few minutes, but a system of charging stations all over the place that could feed to millions of EVs doesn't look like being a thing any time soon. They're aiming at mobile devices. Charge your smartphone in 45 seconds, that sort of thing.

EDIT: Oops, I forgot key details. The batteries are graphene aluminium ion and are manufactured by the Graphene Manufacturing Group.

 

[Devilman]

There's a potentially possibly viable new battery technology that might perhaps maybe solve that problem in the not vastly distant future. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly.

Yeah, I know. It's the bazillionth such claim in the last 15 years. But there is a huge difference in this case - batteries using the new battery tech are actually being made and have been sent to potential major customers for evaluation. Actual batteries, produced in an actual production facility and expected to work in real world use. Not lab-only prototypes. Only button batteries at the moment, but it's something. Energy density is lower than Li-ion, but the charging rate is vastly higher and the lower energy density is partially offset by not needing cooling (so more cells can be packaged into the same amount of space). Charging is as much as 70 times as fast. EV scale use isn't really on the horizon yet, though. It doesn't currently look possible to be supplying that much electricity at that rate. Theoretically you could pour it in at a rate of hundreds of KW and charge the batteries for an EV in a few minutes, but a system of charging stations all over the place that could feed to millions of EVs doesn't look like being a thing any time soon. They're aiming at mobile devices. Charge your smartphone in 45 seconds, that sort of thing.

EDIT: Oops, I forgot key details. The batteries are graphene aluminium ion and are manufactured by the Graphene Manufacturing Group.

Sounds like an interesting tech and hope it pans out as something useful.

The only issue I see with rapid charging of EV's is that at some point you're going to have to up the charging voltage to get enough KW through in a short enough space of time, else the size (and weight) of the charging cables etc.. would become ridiculous.
Current Tesla Model 3 is I think 50KWh battery, so to charge that in say.. 30mins @ 240v would require pushing something like 425amps continuously for 30mins, the conductors needed for that would be about an inch thick.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

'Just stop oil'. How about providing alternatives. Insulating your house better doesn't stop oil.

The only way to reduce fossil fuel consumption is to greatly increase the price of it. All the time gas is 1/3 the cost of electric per kwh, people will continue to use it to heat their homes.

The cost of diesel going up is a good start (if you're interested in reducing fossil fuel use), but it still needs to go further to force the dinosaurs to start making the shift to EVs.

No. But insulating homes you reduce the overall consumption, which in turn reduces our reliance on oil and gas.

Where do you think electricity for EVs comes from? It’s not wind farms.

Though I do strongly agree with you. Price increases, whilst painful, are one of the best ways to make people act on reducing their energy usage.

 

[Angst]

The problem with increasing the price of gas and oil as a way to force migration is that it only impacts the people who cant afford to move away from using it. Really you would also need to properly fund the move to better alternatives.

 

[Devilman]

The problem with increasing the price of gas and oil as a way to force migration is that it only impacts the people who cant afford to move away from using it. Really you would also need to properly fund the move to better alternatives.

Very true.. In a similar vein I feel that offering those who arguably can afford the increase in costs massive incentives to switch by means of cheap EV charging, cheap "off-peak" energy to top-up their £6000 battery that couldn't get enough energy from their £5000 of solar panels etc.... is helping entirely the wrong group of people.

 

[theone8181]

Sounds like an interesting tech and hope it pans out as something useful.

The only issue I see with rapid charging of EV's is that at some point you're going to have to up the charging voltage to get enough KW through in a short enough space of time, else the size (and weight) of the charging cables etc.. would become ridiculous.
Current Tesla Model 3 is I think 50KWh battery, so to charge that in say.. 30mins @ 240v would require pushing something like 425amps continuously for 30mins, the conductors needed for that would be about an inch thick.

It's 3 phase though, and it's "only" about 200A when I checked. It's not to bad when charging at 130kw.

 

[Devilman]

3 Phase is 415v so it makes sense it would be roughly half the current.

Point is to truly replace the flexibility of a ICE vehicle, they need to both increase the battery capacity and decrease the charging time, which means more realistically you could be looking at vehicles with 100khw or 150kwh batteries in the not-too-distant future and even at 415v, trying to charge 150kwh battery in 30mins and you're right back in the ballpark of ~420ish amps and inch-diameter charging cables..

 

[Angilion]

3 Phase is 415v so it makes sense it would be roughly half the current.

Point is to truly replace the flexibility of a ICE vehicle, they need to both increase the battery capacity and decrease the charging time, which means more realistically you could be looking at vehicles with 100khw or 150kwh batteries in the not-too-distant future and even at 415v, trying to charge 150kwh battery in 30mins and you're right back in the ballpark of ~420ish amps and inch-diameter charging cables..

I think it's even worse than that because to truly match an ICE vehicle "filling" time would have to be reduced to a few minutes. Then there's the issue of scale. You'd need to have charging stations in as many locations as there are currently petrol stations and the charging stations would have to be able to handle the same number of cars simultaneously. So a station for charging a 150KWh battery pack in 30 minutes would have to be capable of supplying 300KW per car. That would often mean a requirement for over 1MW, sustained.

Or you'd have to have even more stations and even shorter "filling" time in order to make them equally practical with a lower range.

Or the EVs themselves would have to be so cheap that they would be practical as a second car used for shorter distances. But then we'd have even more cars and nowhere to park them.

Switching to a different battery tech for smaller, less power-hungry devices would be of some use in reducing the environmental and social cost and obvious unsustainability of Li-ion batteries. Recycling Li-ion batteries isn't practical, so in practice they're a finite resource as well as an environmentally, socially and politically dubious one. Graphene Aluminion-ion batteries use materials common almost everywhere and are far more practical to recycle, so they're far better in all those respects. Also, it would be nice to have graphene being useful rather than potentially useful as it has been for years. The core of what GMG is claiming to have achieved is really more about the cost of graphene production than about batteries. But batteries get more attention and are a potentially profitable mass market product.

 

[dowie]

I think these hippie types who are targeting road users etc.. are just dumb, the government has literally already put into place the sort of change that is needed so they're fighting an utterly pointless cause and just irritating and causing disruption for a few unlucky road users who get caught up in a traffic jam caused by one of their pointless protests.

IIRC the group kicking off instead about home insulation has one utter moron who was going around the news programs refusing to even say if his home was insulated and another prominent member who was, of all things, a BTL landlord who hadn't even insulated his own properties! Yet apparently was angry enough to demand the government do something despite having ample opportunity to do something himself. They're mostly just virtue signaling idiots and I can't take them seriously at all.

More hypocrisy, what a surprise, the chick who glued herself to a painting is from a well-off family with two homes + takes holidays to Australia, Bali, the Canary Islands...

Fury as Just Stop Oil founder glues herself to John Constable classic

Student Hannah Hunt, 23, is a Just Stop Oil protester whose social media pages are adorned with exotic holiday pictures from Bali, Australia and the Canary Islands.

www.dailymail.co.uk

IMO it's just virtue signaling for these people, they get to feel self-righteous for a bit while seemingly having a pretty massive carbon footprint, likely well above that of the average brit, themselves.

At least Great is an autist and so has inevitably turned into a fan of trains and boats.

 

[theone8181]

More hypocrisy, what a surprise, the chick who glued herself to a painting is from a well-off family with two homes + takes holidays to Australia, Bali, the Canary Islands...

Fury as Just Stop Oil founder glues herself to John Constable classic

Student Hannah Hunt, 23, is a Just Stop Oil protester whose social media pages are adorned with exotic holiday pictures from Bali, Australia and the Canary Islands.

www.dailymail.co.uk

IMO it's just virtue signaling for these people, they get to feel self-righteous for a bit while seemingly having a pretty massive carbon footprint, likely well above that of the average brit, themselves.

At least Great is an autist and so has inevitably turned into a fan of trains and boats.

It's always the same type of people though. If you're a millionaire and go green and it costs 10k a year, it's in the noise. A couple earning minimum wage with kids it's probably more than half their disposable income.

 

[m4rmite]

3 Phase is 415v so it makes sense it would be roughly half the current.

Point is to truly replace the flexibility of a ICE vehicle, they need to both increase the battery capacity and decrease the charging time, which means more realistically you could be looking at vehicles with 100khw or 150kwh batteries in the not-too-distant future and even at 415v, trying to charge 150kwh battery in 30mins and you're right back in the ballpark of ~420ish amps and inch-diameter charging cables..

EV Database

Useable battery capacity of electric vehicles cheatsheet. Quick reference for all plug-in hybrid en full electric cars.

ev-database.uk

Cars that already have 100+kwh batteries exist, big battery sizes doesn't mean big range.
Evs batteries are already 400v but only use single phase charging due to the way the uk is domestically wired.
French cars have 3 phase charging as that is the way their domestic market is wired.
800v batteries is a way to charge faster-at present. Porsche, kia(some) and hyundai (some) also use 800v batteries hence their fast charging times.

A few comments that nark me regarding charging.
Time to charge - if charging from home it takes a minute to plug it in and a minute to unplug and put the cable back.

While you're watching netflix/ sleeping it's charging without any intervention required.

Range anxiety.
Should be called charging infrastructure anxiety as that's the bit that needs to catch up as sales rise.

But what if i want to jump in my car and go to Cornwall on holiday?
Always spouted by the same people who've never driven to Cornwall.
What if i want to drive 400 miles in 1 go... who does that?
Look at any motorway service station and county how many cars are parked up while the owners use the toilets/ eat a big mac/ catch 40 winks.
Now imagine 100 chargers instead of the usual 2 for people to plug in?

Yes the car uses more battery in the cold weather but who drives to Cornwall in December regularly.


The down side of mass switching of transport to electric is that 66%of crude is used in the transportation industry, i know that includes shipping which electric wouldn't be a viable switch as yet.
This would mean that the industrial side of the oil would be expensive to refine as the fuel cut could potentially be worthless.

Ok. As you were.

 

[b0rn2sk8]

Rapid EV charging is done via DC, not AC.

Charging at home is sort of irrelevant because the car is parked for tens of hours at a time. Most people could get away with a 10a 3 pin plug and don’t even need a 32a charger. The car is doing the AC to DC conversion using its onboard charger and they are normally limited to 7kw single phase or 11kw 3 phase.

Rapid charging is a different beast and the charging station does the AC to DC conversion and they consume ridiculous amounts of power already. When you plug them into an empty car they can push 425A at 400v or 800v / 175kw and 350kw respectively. In reality cars can’t take that current for more than a few mins, if at all. Tesla’s system will push 600a at 400v at its peak.

To achieve that they already water cool the cables to stop them melting and they are thick beasts already.

To charge a 60 kWh car in 5 mins you are talking about needing a sustained power input in the region of 700kw or nearly 900A at 800V, that’s nuts. If you want to do a 100kwh battery in 5 mins then scale accordingly.

You also can’t just increase the voltage as the higher you go, the risk of arching increases and the thicker the insulation you need around all the conductors.

Then there is the power supply it’s self, power grids are just not going to be able to cope with loads like that which are constantly being turned off, on, off, on, off, on etc. which means you need huge buffer batteries between the charger and the grid.

The TLDR is that charging an huge EV battery in 5 mins probably isn’t going to happen, it’s not just about the battery tech, there are several limitations where you are fighting physics to make that happen.

Likewise, it’s also a problem that doesn’t need to be solved to that extent in reality. A 20-30 min stop after 4 hours of driving to get enough charge for another 2.5-3 hours driving is entirely sensible.

The EV tech on the roads today is suitable for 99% of car buyers, it’s just too expensive. Rather than making it charge faster, they need to make what they have now cheaper and put it in cheaper vehicles instead of 2T SUVs that no one really needs.

 

[PlacidCasual]

Super annoyed about these pillocks targeting art galleries now. I take trips to galleries and museums a few times a year it's a real privilege to be able to get so close to such impressive pieces of art. All these ego driven performance activists are going to do is make it harder for people like me to get close to these magnificent items. Screens and barriers will go up literally barring us from enjoying the art. Millions of people each year enjoy these things like myself and will be the poorer. Grrrrr

 

[Chris Wilson]

Last time I checked the electricity board wanted £20.000 to bring 3 phase onto my house property, and that's if I myself dug the trench from the road to where the metering equipment would reside.

Putting the majority of domestic and commercial properties on 3 phase supplies would be astronomically expensive and disruptive.

Until I can recharge a vehicle in the same time frame I can fill a petrol or diesel vehicle's tank and then get the same uninterrupted driving range to me electric vehicles are of no interest whatsoever.

The national grid is creaking and groaning as it is without every Tom, Dick and Harry plugging in high current drains to charge huge batteries. ICE rules for me

 

[dlockers]

Last time I checked the electricity board wanted £20.000 to bring 3 phase onto my house property, and that's if I myself dug the trench from the road to where the metering equipment would reside.

Putting the majority of domestic and commercial properties on 3 phase supplies would be astronomically expensive and disruptive.

Until I can recharge a vehicle in the same time frame I can fill a petrol or diesel vehicle's tank and then get the same uninterrupted driving range to me electric vehicles are of no interest whatsoever.

The national grid is creaking and groaning as it is without every Tom, Dick and Harry plugging in high current drains to charge huge batteries. ICE rules for me

They also had to do that to deliver gas when that became a thing. And then again for telephone. And then again for NTL/Telewest/Virgin.

Why are you so anti-progress? Let me guess - old, single?

 

[PlacidCasual]

Anyone over 40 should clearly recognise how much busier our roads are now than they were in the 80's and earlier. Mass roll outs involving such digging is going to be disruptive.

The issue of the resilience of the local and national grid should not be overlooked. Increasing demand especially where highly distributed generation is fluctuating in load is no mean feat to manage. Our current arrangements were literally not designed with this requirement in mind. Solar fluctuations have caused fatigue failures to thermal generation plant in Turkey and South Australia where the grid was insufficient smooth these fluctuations out.

We are at a uniquely dangerous point for security of supply in this country and should be careful how we address those challenges.

 

[b0rn2sk8]

Last time I checked the electricity board wanted £20.000 to bring 3 phase onto my house property, and that's if I myself dug the trench from the road to where the metering equipment would reside.

Putting the majority of domestic and commercial properties on 3 phase supplies would be astronomically expensive and disruptive.

Until I can recharge a vehicle in the same time frame I can fill a petrol or diesel vehicle's tank and then get the same uninterrupted driving range to me electric vehicles are of no interest whatsoever.

The national grid is creaking and groaning as it is without every Tom, Dick and Harry plugging in high current drains to charge huge batteries. ICE rules for me

Why do you need 3 phase at home to charge a car? Your car will be parked there for 10’s of hours every week.

Even if it was ‘only’ parked there for 10 hours a day, that’s enough time to add 70kwh to the battery on a single phase 32a supply which is typically for a domestic installation. That would get you 210-280 miles, most cars are parked on drives for far longer and the average daily milage is around 25 miles.

I’m really not sure why you ‘need’ 3 phase….

Why do you need to charge at the same rate as filling petrol and diesel? Cars spend 90+% of their entire lives parked, that’s when you charge it. You’ll do 99.9% of your charging when you are doing something else.

Imagine leaving home with a full tank of petrol every day and not having to go to the filling station, that’s what owning an EV is like for the vast majority of people. The issue to solve is off street parking and flats but the solutions are there, someone just has to pay for it…

Most commercial properties already have 3 phase unless it’s a tiny high street shop.

 

[Freakbro]

But what if i want to jump in my car and go to Cornwall on holiday?
Always spouted by the same people who've never driven to Cornwall.

I recently drove to Cornwall for a weekend away

What if i want to drive 400 miles in 1 go... who does that?

Me, I hate stopping on a journey

 

[b0rn2sk8]

There are loads of good rapid chargers in the south west. Exeter services will be one of the biggest charging hubs in the country once Tesla complete their installation. There are already a whole load of Gridserve 350kw chargers.

 

[adencool]

just virtue signalling. Oil era is nearer to the end than the beginning. no protest is going to increase ev usage, but it will happen natrually.
i would estimate that 50% of all cars in the early 2030's is non ice